Although 15,000 fewer refugees are coming to Canada by the end of the year, Surrey’s landed refugee community is working hard on initiatives to help Canada’s new arrivals in their transition.

When Simon Fraser University received funding from Surrey’s Local Immigration Partnership to address the settlement needs of refugees, they knew they needed some extra help — so they hired nine research assistants who arrived in Canada as refugees.

The research project is gathering data through focus groups to identify the settlement needs of refugees arriving in Surrey.

Mohamed Muktar Mussa is one those research assistants working with SFU’s Our Community Our Voice (OCOV) research project. He arrived in Canada in 2010 after spending seven years growing up in a refugee camp in Eritrea.

“Invaluable, it’s been the main ingredient in my opinion,” said Tara Holt, one of the lead researchers with OCOV, about the impact of the research assistants on the project.